ZeroDegrees Responds

Further to my ZeroDegrees debacle, in which I succeeded in spamming 2,000 people in my contact book with barely a click, here’s a response from ZeroDegrees‘ Jas Dhillon, CEO and president of the company, and Mark Jeffrey, VP of Product, to my questions. I’ve edited a little for length.

How is it that even experienced users can be duped into sending invitations to their whole address book? Why is there no confirmation option, or chance to select who they include?

We don’t force you to invite any of your contacts if you don’t want to. If you want to selectively invite your contacts you can click on the “Not Now” button, login to the web application and selective invite your contacts to join ZeroDegrees and become part of your “friends network.” We do provide a customization button where you can accomplish exactly what you requested. The customization button is on the lower left hand corner of the “build my network” box. After clicking the button, you can manually select contacts from your list that you do not want to send a ZeroDegrees invite to. It is that simple.

How does one remove one’s contacts from ZeroDegrees’ servers if one decides not to continue the service?

Just drop an email to customer care requesting that your name and contacts be removed from the ZeroDegrees server. This is done within 48 hours of receiving the request.

How does ZeroDegrees plan to make money from the service?

Stay tuned.

Sorry, but I don’t really think these answers are sufficient. The process to manually select contacts should be the default: It should be very, very hard for users to send emails to everyone in their address book, and it should be very, very easy for them to (a) know this is happening and (b) be able to stop it at any point. None of this is true in ZeroDegrees’ case. It does not sound “simple” to me, and I suspect it wouldn’t to the casual user.

Secondly, removing one’s contacts from ZeroDegrees’ servers should not involve sending an email to customer care or having any direct contact with the company. By definition someone wanting to remove their contacts from ZeroDegrees is probably wanting to minimise any contact. There should be a checkbox or some other prominent menu option that makes it easy for users to do this. This option should be part of the uninstall process, too, since it’s likely many folk uninstalling the program are those who want to unsubscribe from the service.

Lastly, not giving any clue about how the company intends to make money from the service is only going to add to suspicion about what ZeroDegrees plans to do with all the sensitive data it is collecting. The company should be upfront about this. None of these issues is new: We’ve been here before with Plaxo which has endured a battering from users concerned about privacy. Plaxo, at least, has responded to those concerns, and is stronger for it. The chances of ZeroDegrees avoiding that scrutiny, if it gains any traction at all, are slim.

The application enhancements that Jeremy suggested are in the works and will be part of an upcoming release. “Stay Tuned” means that we are not prepared to share our revenue model with our “competitors” until we are ready to execute on it.

Im so sick of all the social networking websites with hidden flaus like this for the user. I only use one other site now besides myspace and thats http://www.swellster.com. Its up front and targeted to what I like. Besides why would you want to share all your close contacts to everybody?

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All opinions are my own, and not necessarily those of Thomson Reuters.